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Май 2011

With the increasing complexity of doing business today, the space between a customer and a lost opportunity or a deal and a disaster, has been reduced to the width of a light beam.

Employee training represents an important process to provide each individual of teams with the skills and knowledge to turn challenges into opportunities, while establishing high-performing teams that focus on meeting customer needs. In light of this, HID continuously invests in talent development in order to quickly adapt to evolving customers' requirements.

It is critical to develop organizational scalability in all functions of our organization to meet and exceed customer requirements. Effective training ensures everyone is aware of our "Customer First" mantra and our core values around building engaged teams that focus on innovation and process excellence. Accordingly, our recent management development program is geared towards educating managers on how to facilitate successful teamwork to deliver on these customer values.

Currently, HID provides a minimum of 40 hours professional development training to employees each year. Our training programs are instrumental in sharing job-related wisdom, skills and expertise that are essential for working with our customers. Employees also gain new customer insights and important tools from each other through our interdepartmental and lean manufacturing trainings, and we've found that the inspirations resulting from this cross-pollination are taken back to the workplace and ultimately improve our customer operations processes.

As part of our commitment to Genuine HID, investing in our team is key since our employees form the foundation that makes it possible for us to deliver quality products and customer service to enhance customer value.

I am excited to be playing a role in the ongoing development of the HID team and having a direct impact on driving HID Global's customer satisfaction excellence.

I have not spent a day without a smart card, and would guess that neither have you.

Everyday on my way to work, I pick up my breakfast using an e-purse card, take the subway to work using a transit card, and finally access the office with my employee badge...and all these cards use smart card technology.

Recently there have been several initiatives in Thailand to promote the use of multiple applications on smart cards. For instance, a system provider in Thailand has initiated an innovative project at gas stations that enables cashless payment with corporate ID cards, where employees can use their employee badge to buy gas and make purchases in the gas station retail shops.

And this is just one of many successful NFC trials in Thailand over the past couple of years. Some banks and mobile phone carriers have developed applications on smart phones that promote and direct mobile phone users to particular retail store, where simply tapping their phone on the payment terminal at the store is enough for the mobile phone user to buy groceries and a range of other goods and services.

The success of these NFC trials re-enforces that Thailand is one of the larger potential markets for this technology once NFC-supported handsets are made available on a mass scale. And mass scale usage is expected: NFC Times has recently reported at least 20% smart phones will support NFC by 2014. This figure is equivalent to nearly 300 million phones and is similar to the number of people using 3G mobile devices today.

By combining contactless and NFC technologies, multi-applications on NFC smart phones will shortly become a reality. Our next generation iCLASS SE physical access control platform and HID's Trusted Identity Platform™ are ahead of the curve, making sure that our customers are armed in advance with the tools and technology they will need to securely enable the use of virtual credentials on mobile devices. Stay tuned to learn more about how HID's next generation platform makes it possible to take full advantage of NFC and other future technologies.

...and very few challenges have caused more heartburn for our federal government customers than meeting the latest identification requirements of Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 (HSPD-12), as defined by FIPS-201. At ISC West last month, we introduced the remedy through solutions developed as part of our Federal Identity Compliance Initiative.

In February 2011, the government issued a memorandum stating that all existing physical and logical access control systems must be upgraded to implement Personal Identification Verification (PIV) credentials before federal agencies can use development and technology refresh funds to complete other activities. In the past, compliance was a very costly and complex process, and required agencies to gather, organize and deploy a large number of technologies, experts and third-party suppliers. Too often, agencies had to rip out their current physical access control head-end servers, panels and door control hardware as a result.

During ISC West, we showed customers just how easy FIPS-201 compliance can actually be using a modular approach with HID solutions that offers a clear migration path for achieving FIPS-201 compliance...at significantly lower cost and without having to "rip and replace" their existing access control infrastructure.

We know how challenging it has been for federal agencies to meet the latest government mandates, and I am excited by our new solution that enables agencies to meet these compliance requirements by upgrading their existing PACS infrastructure to authenticate credentials across the full range of assurance levels. The Genuine HID solutions that make up our compliance initiative also help deliver converged physical and logical security as envisioned by HSPD-12, and they are unique in driving both FIPS 201 and SP 800-116 compliance. What's more HID will also extend our initiative beyond FIPS 201 to support other Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-at-the-door compliance requirements, as well as PIV-I and PIV-C (PIV-compatible) requirements for cards issued by non-federal entities.

Stay tuned for more information and for tips from HID that will help simplify and streamline the compliance process for your organization.

The first few things that I noticed when I moved to Australia at the end of 2010 were Melbourne's coffee culture and appetite for dining out as well as the widespread of HID's products -- especially iCLASS -- in major cities.

Australia has been an early adopter of 13.56 MHz and HID iCLASS technologies as many organizations have deployed smart card solutions for new installations. Small businesses to large organizations realized early on the benefits of this technology and set out to take full advantage of adding multi-applications to a single card, as well as the higher security this technology offers. And over the past few years, there has continued to be a steady migration from 125 kHz to iCLASS and other smart card technologies in the region. This migration is a global trend, but what's remarkable is that a large number of the iCLASS installations in Australia are also being combined with HID's iCLASS Elite program.

The Elite Program offers customers a custom authentication key that provides an increase to their existing security; HID assigns the key to guarantee uniqueness and programs the site-specific readers and credentials to protect the entire organization against security threats. With Australia being known for its attractiveness as a test market for new technology, it is no surprise that when it comes to access control, organizations in Australia were quick to realize the value of implementing our smart card technology and leveraging HID's iCLASS Elite program for increased security.

In Australia, I've also noticed that there is a deep passion for creating unique experiences to appease the local appetite...not only the appetite for convenient, secure and cost-effective access control solutions, but also for getting the most out of many cultural experiences as well. Two of the most interesting Australian delights I've enjoyed since my arrival are dining out and the Aussies' ability to make grabbing a cup of coffee a spectacular but affordable event.

As I make my way through the culinary treasures the Aussie way and continue to explore the security and access control landscape here, I would love to hear comments and feedback on Genuine HID solutions you have deployed so that we can continue to enhance HID's customer service to suit your needs and provide the best possible secure identity solutions. Sending along your recommendations for spots for a great flat white (a café latte without foam) is welcomed too!

...and since as a product manager iCLASS SE is near and dear to me - and it is a product for which I have a lot "sweat equity" - I thought I would share a bit more about what it is and what it means for the industry.

Simply stated, iCLASS SE is HID's next-generation reader technology, which is moving the concept of "identity" beyond traditional I.D. cards to smartphones, memory sticks, USB tokens and other mobile platforms that enable us to stay connected anywhere we go.

There has been a lot of new recently about mobile commerce developments, including reports that Microsoft is adding Near Field Communications (NFC) short-range wireless communication technology to its Windows Phone mobile operating system, and that Google, RIM and Apple are all preparing mobile payment and wallet systems. Earlier this month, the ISIS coalition (AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless) announced plans for the first pilot mobile commerce network using smartphone and NFC technology.

These and other initiatives will enable us to use our mobile devices to open doors, buy tickets and execute other secure transactions. NFC is one technology for doing this, and there are many more. First, however, there must be a way to ensure that virtual identity credentials can be securely moved from one platform to another. That's where HID's next-generation iCLASS SE reader and credential platform comes in, with a new, portable credential methodology called the Secure Identity Object™ (SIO). An SIO is a standards-based, device-independent data object that can exist on any number of identity devices.

SIOs and SIO interpreters behave like traditional cards and readers but use a significantly more secure, flexible and extensible data structure. So this means that we are still talking about the same basic nuts and bolts of an access control system -- just more secure, more flexible cards and readers that can extend their capabilities more easily and seamlessly in the future. Because they're portable, SIOs can reside on traditional contactless credentials and many different mobile formats. The device-independent SIOs act as a data wrapper to provide additional key diversification, authentication and encryption while guarding against security threats. And since SIOs use open standards language definition, they can expand to include more security mechanisms (e.g. asymmetric keys). Conversely, traditional architectures that are technology-specific can remain stuck in a fixed definition.

The first product to implement this technology will be HID Global's iCLASS SIO-Enabled (SE) reader and credential family. iCLASS SE readers and credentials also will be the first access control products to operate under the company's Trusted Identity Platform™ (TIP) framework for greater security, providing end-to-end privacy and integrity.We are extremely excited about the iCLASS SE platform and its potential for revolutionizing access control and mobile commerce. It isn't enough to be connected everywhere, we also need to be secure. iCLASS SE with HID Global's SIO technology makes this possible.